Halldór Laxness: Trending quotes

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Halldór Laxness: 432 quotes5 likes

“Dear darling Americans, Jesus let them come with the atom bomb quick.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Cleopatra
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“It is a waste of words to try to impute to the Creator democratic ideas or social virtues; or to think that one can move Him with weeping and wailing, and persuade Him with logic and legal quibbles. Nothing is so pointless as words.”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Pastor Jón's eulogy to Dr. Sýngmann
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“[T]ime passed and there was really no romance in life anymore, only the tedious tranquility of marriage without excitement or curiosity, the dull routine of making a comfortable living with nothing to nourish the imagination.”

Halldór Laxness

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity

“Slow good luck is best.”

Halldór Laxness

Álfgrímur's grandmother
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“White ravens are rare.”

Halldór Laxness

Björn of Brekkukot
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“It is anything but easy trying to speak of a person one knows so little about but who is nevertheless so close to me.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all man are mortal - yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself. It was as if a fish were suddenly to discover the water it swam in. I mentioned this to my grandfather one day when we happened to be alone in the living-room.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“When we talked about Danish novels, it was as if we had in mind a vague impression of Dostoyevsky and those other story-tellers who appear to have spilled a great mass of tar which then, obeying only the laws of gravity, somehow oozes along formlessly into every crack and crevice.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“If you’re fond of someone, you don’t care even if he doesn’t live in a palace and even if all the banks where he has deposits and all the worldcities where he is famous don’t exist.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“One night you discover to your great surprise that you have not spent all your money that day, he said. Next morning you wake up early and go out and buy yourself a hat – and when you have got the hat you realize that you now have even more money in your pocket. You invite a friend, two or three of them perhaps, to come with you to a restaurant, and you eat your fill of all the best food and wines available there. When you simply can’t force down another bite and you leave the restaurant, you discover that you’ve made yet another haul while you were sitting inside. You become flurried and go and buy a house with a garden to try to rid yourself of this trash, but no sooner have you paid for the house cash down than you notice that your money has multiplied through the purchase. Now you are seized with a kind of frenzy that Björn of Brekkukot would never understand, far less your grandmother. You set off travelling round and round the world, pouring out money with both hands to other demented vagrants wherever you go, and you don’t even dare to open your letters because you know that they will all say the same thing: your deposits at I don’t know how many banks all over the world are still growing with ever increasing speed.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“I felt that I was dying, and perhaps I did die a little, or rather began to die in the way that the cocoon of the chrysalis cracks at the end of winter; but unfortunately I did not die so thoroughly that I achieved new life like a butterfly.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“October passed, and there was no change inside the cubicle; except that the woman only became paler and more lifeless. Until finally the time came when she became transparent; she underwent that transformation, that transguration of countenance that sometimes comes to sufferers when the last of their strength ebbs away.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“Genuine gold does not exist, children, he said. Gold is by its nature not genuine.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“I’m afraid I’m not very good at Latin, said the superintendent. On the other hand I sometimes think about arithmetic; and in particular about one number – the number One. But I will admit that it is also the most incomprehensible number in the world. Beyond this particular dimension I know only one thing which is supernatural, even though it may well be the reality that affects mortal men most deeply; and that is Time. And when one comes to think about this strange place I was telling you about, the world that is only One, and its connection with the only supernatural thing we know, Time, then everything ceases to be higher or lower than anything else, larger or smaller.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“...life has taught me to make no distinction between a hero and a little man, between great events and small trifles. From my point of view, men and events are all more or less the same size.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“Curiosity can be called a virtue or a vice, depending on what kind of elementary ethics one reads; in our house at Brekkukot, curiosity was considered on a par with thievishness.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)